The Dot Inspired Art

The Dot Inspired Art | Mama Papa Bubba{this post contains affiliate links}

When Miss G was gifted The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds last spring, we immediately fell in love.  The story is about a little girl named Vashti whose paper is blank at the end of art class.  After telling her teacher that she ‘just CAN’T draw!’, the teacher uses subtle and clever encouragement to get Vashti to step out of her comfort zone.  Vashti starts by just making a mark, but that one mark ends up becoming something beautiful as Vashti lets go and gains confidence.  In the end, not only does Vashti become a confident artist, but she also helps others who are feeling insecure with their ability to create art.  Pretty awesome storyline, right?

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Since today is International Dot Day, I decided that Miss G and I would create some beautiful dots of our own…  As I often do, I set up an invitation to create late last night so that she’d discover it first thing this morning. The set-up was simple…  It included a bunch of white circles punched out of watercolour paper using a 2 inch circle punch, our beloved watercolour paints from Ikea, some paintbrushes, a couple of small dishes of water, a paper napkin, and some tape {you can see the set-up before Miss G got to it here}.  In order to make things a bit easier for her, I taped several of the circles onto the placemats and I also included The Dot nearby to give the invitation some context.

As I suspected she would, she came into my room this morning, gave me a hug, and then asked if she could do her painting activity straight away.  I agreed of course, and before long, she was back to announce that she loved her activity and had painted every single last circle.

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Of course, she wasn’t quite done yet…  She wanted more circles for us to paint together this time around!  {*twist my rubber arm*}

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Together, we painted dot after dot after dot until our collection looked like this.

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When they were dry, we gave them a little iron to flatten them out completely, and then we retrieved a couple square pieces of white card stock as well as some foamy double-sided mounting tape {glue would work just as well, but we went with the foam tape in order to get a bit of a 3D effect}.

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With the mounting tape cut into tiny little squares, we got to work on sticking our beautiful watercolour dots onto our card stock {which of course led to some great fine motor skill practice with all of the sticker backing removal that was going on}.

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While Grae went for a more organic layout, I placed my dots in 4 rows of 4 for a different finished look.

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I love these so much that they just may end up framed in shadow boxes, but for now, we’ve got them tacked up onto the wall above our creative space using some pretty striped washi tape, which suits me just fine.

 

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2 thoughts on “The Dot Inspired Art

  1. I’ve just gone and sorted seven birthday presents … Being in a Mothers group means that all the birthdays come at once … and more! What are those presents you may ask? The Dot book which I ordered through the Book Depository and received within the week, a set of water colours, 3 x paintbrushes and a water colour sketch book for each of them.

    Thank you so much for a brilliant idea!!! I love the fact that you can make your activities into a gift and at the same time use them on your own child.

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